>From my personal experience, there are two problems with the digest, one
easily fixable, the other less so.
1) HTML - as Sam said, some who post from work have no option to send in
plain text. This is a bugger, but a bearable bugger nevertheless. We are a
community, and should have some respect for the various set-ups we all
endure/enjoy (delete as applicable ;-)). The digest lets us see all that
nasty HTML either in the post, or as a second version of the post
immediately following the plain version (for some odd reason I don't
understand - no, don't explain it to me...)
2) Quoting - This is completely in the hands of those replying to a thread.
Hey, email is immediate, hip, fun, shoot-from-the-hip. If you have an answer
to a question, or a smart comment to make, it's dead easy, and very
tempting, to just type that ONE LINE and hit 'reply'. And maybe you don't
have the option to exclude original posts from your replies? Well, maybe you
can be forgiven once or twice for succumbing to the heat of the moment.
Again I say this is a community and I think we should have some respect for
the members of the list who find it convenient / necessary to be on the
Digest only.
I have a dial-up connection using my cable phone line. I don't have much
cash coming in right now, so a change is unlikely. I log on once, maybe
twice a day to download my mail. More at weekends. Digests full of HTML and
ESPECIALLY QUOTING are hard to read and a bit disappointing, full as they
are of old stuff. We have to skim through it all, in case there is a comment
hidden in all that quoted stuff.
Of course, all of this may be a pain in the butt for those of you who like
to shoot from the hip and who find snipping an inconvenience.
So why offer a Digest option? If the 'Digesters' are an inconvenience, tell
us. I enjoy the list, but I don't want to feel like I'm at the leper window
watching Mass...
Donald.
Donald Neil MacDonald BA DipLIS
www.bigmac1st.freeserve.co.uk
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